You don’t have to be an analytics guru to know if your website is bringing in business or is just a high-priced Internet brochure. Here are the questions to ask to assure your online presence is a tool for revenue and not just a locked storefront door.
What is driving traffic to the website? Traffic is driven to websites by online ads, Google AdWords, organic SEO, press releases, webinars, social media and newsletters. Each has strengths and weaknesses in cost, time and ROI. The easiest way to determine the efficacy of these methods is by making sure Google Analytics is installed on your site and regularly reviewing its reports. The free platform tracks website user behavior at the granular level, so you can adjust strategies accordingly.
What is working and what is not? Web analytics offer a dizzying array of data that can be parsed based on defined goals for the website. Get a snapshot of your site’s visitors in Google Analytics by clicking “Acquisition” and “Overview.” You’ll learn how many visitors find the site through organic Google searches, direct website searches, social media, email campaigns or a referral from another site. You can generate comparisons by changing the search dates to view traffic by page on different days of the week. The results are often surprisingly useful.
What can we do to be “sticky”? Stickiness is how long someone stays on a website. The more informative the content of blogs, videos and infographics, the longer visitors stay. Blogs are key to optimizing organic SEO, which simply means a web page gets a high ranking on a search engine based on the way keywords are used in the page’s copy. Recent studies show that 80% of companies report acquiring customers through their blogging efforts, and 82% said blogging is critical to their business. When it comes to visitor engagement, blogs are king. This is because they’re typically informative stories and have a point of view, so visitors gain insight and engagement is achieved.
Are we driving “conversions”? At the end of the day, the true litmus test is conversions, which occur when a website visitor completes your desired goal, such as filling out a form, scheduling a consultation or making a purchase. This is not just transactional. A great conversion may be causing the visitor to take a step closer to your company by signing up for the newsletter, viewing the contact info page, following your company on social media or commenting on a blog post.
Website optimization is an ongoing challenge, but the potential rewards are great. Give us a call if you’d like to dig deeper into your analytics, content creation and online business goals.
Best,
Tracy
